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James Crichton-Browne
Sir James Crichton-Browne MD FRS (29 November 1840 – 31 January 1938) was a leading British psychiatrist famous for studies on the relationship of mental illness to brain injury - and for the development of public health policies in relation to mental health. Crichton-Browne was a celebrated author and orator, one of Charles Darwin's most significant correspondents and collaborators, editor of the extremely influential West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports (six volumes, 1871 to 1876) - and - like Duchenne de Boulogne and Hugh Welch Diamond - a pioneer of neuropsychiatric photography. Crichton-Browne was based in Wakefield from 1866 to 1875, and there he set up a unique asylum laboratory, establishing instruction in psychiatry for students from the nearby Leeds School of Medicine. In 1895, Crichton-Browne delivered his Cavendish Lecture On Dreamy Mental States which attracted the disapproval of the American psychologist William James and - in 1907 - he summarised his neuropsychiatric research in his Royal Institution Lecture Dexterity and the Bend Sinister. In 1920, after forty-five years as Lord Chancellor's Medical Visitor, Crichton-Browne delivered the first Maudsley Lecture to the Medico-Psychological Association, in which he outlined his memories of Henry Maudsley. Throughout his career, Crichton-Browne warned of the dangers of subjecting children to emotional stress in the course of their education; emphasised the asymmetrical character of the human brain and behaviour; and also - like Emil Kraepelin and Alois Alzheimer - made some remarkable predictions about the neurological changes associated with severe mental illness. Family Background and Education Crichton-Browne was born in Edinburgh at the family home of his mother, Magdalene Balfour. She was the daughter of Dr Andrew Balfour and belonged to one of Scotland's foremost scientific families - the home (at St John's Hill near Salisbury Crags) had been built in 1770 for the unmarried geologist James Hutton (1726–1797)Repcheck, Jack (2003) The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity, London and New York: Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster), especially pp 124-125 whose mother was Sarah Balfour. Hutton had been a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and his geological theories, involving physical processes exerted over unimaginable periods of time ("...no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end..."), laid much of the foundation for modern environmental science. Crichton-Browne's father, the asylum reformer William A.F. Browne (1805–1885), was a prominent phrenologistKaufman, Matthew H. (2005) Edinburgh Phrenological Society: A History Edinburgh: privately printed, The William Ramsay Henderson Trust who had befriended Charles Darwin at the Plinian Society in Edinburgh in November 1826. Crichton-Browne's godmother was the childless widow Elizabeth Crichton (née Grierson) (1779–1862) who endowed the Crichton Royal hospital in Dumfries in memory of her husband, Dr James Crichton. Crichton-Browne's uncle, John Hutton Balfour (1808-1884), was appointed Professor of Botany at Edinburgh University in 1845 in preference to Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911). Crichton-Browne's younger brother, John Hutton Balfour-Browne K.C. (1845–1921), wrote a classic work on the legal relations of insanityBalfour Browne, J.H. (1875) The Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity San Francisco: Sumner Whitney and his first cousin, Sir Isaac Bayley Balfour (1853–1922), was Sherardian Professor at Oxford and, later, Professor of Botany at Edinburgh. Crichton-Browne spent much of his childhood at the Crichton Royal asylum in Dumfries where his father was the first medical superintendent from 1838 to 1857.McDowall, William (1873) History of the Burgh of Dumfries with notices of Nithsdale, Annandale and the Western Border, 2nd Edition, Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, pp 732-734Scull, Andrew (1991) The Asylum as Utopia: W.A.F. Browne and the Mid-Nineteenth Century Consolidation of Psychiatry, London and New York: Tavistock/RoutledgeScull, Andrew, MacKenzie, Charlotte and Hervey, Nicholas (1996) Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, especially pp. 84-122Walmsley, Tom (1991) Psychiatry in Scotland (in) 150 Years of British Psychiatry 1841-1991, edited by Berrios G.E. and Freeman, Hugh, London: Gaskell/ The Royal College of Psychiatrists, pp 294 - 305Browne, W.A.F. (1864) The Moral Treatment of Insanity Journal of Mental Science, 10, 309 - 337 William A.F. Browne was a pioneering Victorian psychiatrist and an exponent of moral treatment, with an early interest in the psychological lives of his patients as evidenced by their group activities, symptoms, dreams, and art-works. During his twenty years at the Crichton Royal, W.A.F. Browne hoarded a huge collection of patient art Park, Maureen (2010) Art in Madness: Dr W.A.F. Browne's Collection of Patient Art at Crichton Royal Institution, Dumfries, Dumfries and Galloway Health Board, and this interest found a parallel in Crichton-Browne's later asylum photography. In his childhood, Crichton-Browne lost two siblings: his older brother, William (aged 11 years) in 1846 and his sister Jessie (aged 10 years) in 1852. He went to school at Dumfries Academy and then, in line with his mother's episcopalian outlook, to Trinity College, Glenalmond. Shortly before his death, Crichton-Browne wrote a valuable account of his Dumfries childhood, including a description of the visit of the American asylum reformer Dorothea Lynde Dix, and this was published as a Foreword to Charles Easterbrook's Chronicle of the Crichton Royal in 1940.Crichton-Browne, James (1940) Some Early Crichton Memories (in) The Chronicle of Crichton Royal 1833-1936, (edited by C.C. Easterbrook), Dumfries: Courier Press, pp. 1-6 Darwin, Ferrier and the Wakefield Asylum Reports 1866 - 1875 Crichton-Browne studied medicine at Edinburgh University where his uncle was Dean of the Faculty of Medicine; he qualified MRCS in 1861, and MD in 1862 with a thesis on hallucinations. Among his teachers was his father's friend Thomas Laycock (1812–1876) whose "magnum opus" Mind and Brain''Laycock, Thomas (1860) ''Mind and Brain: or, The Correlations of Consciousness and Organization, 2 vols, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox; 2nd edn (1869) London: Simpkin and Marshall. is an extended speculative essay on neurology and psychological life.Beveridge, Allan (1996) On The Origins of Psychiatric Thought: the contribution of Edinburgh, 1730 - 1850, (in) 150 Years of Psychiatry, Vol. 2. The Aftermath, edited by Freeman, Hugh and Berrios, German E., London: The Athlone Press, pp. 339 - 366Crichton-Browne also drew on the writings of the physicians Sir Andrew HallidayHalliday, Sir Andrew (1828) A general view of the present state of lunatics, and lunatic asylums, in Great Britain and Ireland, and in some other kingdoms. London: Underwood and Sir Henry Holland. Like his father, Crichton-Browne had been elected one of the undergraduate Presidents of the Royal Medical SocietyGray, James (1952) History of the Royal Medical Society 1737-1937 Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and, in this capacity, he argued for the place of psychology in the medical curriculum. After working as assistant physician in asylums in Exeter (with John Charles Bucknill), Warwick and Derby, and a brief period on Tyneside, Crichton-Browne was appointed Physician-Superintendent of the West Riding Asylum at Wakefield in 1866; this was the year in which his father served as the first President of the Medico-Psychological Association (now the Royal College of Psychiatrists); and, in his Presidential address delivered at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, W.A.F. Browne gave a rather laborious account of the principles of medical psychologyBrowne, W.A.F. (1866) On Medico-Psychology, Journal of Mental Science, 12, 309 - 327 and recorded the deaths of John Conolly (1794–1866) and Sir Alexander Morison (1779–1866). Crichton-Browne spent ten years at the West Riding Asylum.Todd, John and Ashworth, Lawrence E. (1991) The West Riding Asylum and James Crichton-Browne, 1818-1876, (in) 150 Years of British Psychiatry 1841 - 1991 edited by Berrios, G.E., and Freeman, Hugh, London: Gaskell/ The Royal College of Psychiatrists, pp 389 - 418 He believed that the asylum should be an educational as well as a therapeutic institution and set about a major research programme, bringing biological insights to bear on the causes of insanity. He supervised hundreds of post-mortem examinations of the brain and took a special interest in the clinical features of neurosyphilis. In 1872, Crichton-Browne invited the Scottish neurologist David Ferrier (1843–1928) to direct the asylum laboratories and to conduct electrical studies on the cortical localization of cerebral functions, a research initiative which echoed Duchenne de Boulogne's electrical experiments on the muscles supplied by the seventh (facial) cranial nerveHustvedt, Asti (2011) Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris London: Bloomsbury, especially pp 155 - 159Duchenne (de Boulogne), Guillaume-Benjamin Amand, (1990) The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, edited and translated by R. Andrew Cuthbertson, Cambridge University Press and Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, originally published (1862) as Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine Paris: Jules Renouard, Libraireand which developed the phrenological theories of Crichton-Browne's father, William A.F.Browne. (In 1832-1834, William A.F. Browne had published a serial paper in the Phrenological Journal on the relationship of mental disorder to a disturbance of language, citing clinical cases of brain injury mainly in the frontal lobes).Browne, W.A.F. (1832-1834) On Morbid Manifestations of the Organ of Language, as connected with insanity, The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 8', pp. 250-260, 308-316 and 414-423 On the more general confluence of Crichton-Browne's thinking with his father's phrenology, see the papers by Walmsley, 1993Walmsley, Tom (1993) Psychiatry in Descent: Darwin and the Brownes, ''Psychiatric Bulletin, '''17, 748 - 751and 2003.Walmsley, Tom (2003) Crichton-Browne's Biological Psychiatry, Psychiatric Bulletin, 27, 20 - 22 Ferrier summarised his scientific work at the Wakefield asylum in his neurological classic The Functions of the Brain.Ferrier, David (1876) The Functions of The Brain London: Smith, Elder At the instigation of Henry MaudsleyCollie, Michael (1988) Henry Maudsley: Victorian Psychiatrist: A Bibliographical Study Winchester: St Pauls Bibliographies pp 25 - 26 (1835–1918), Crichton-Browne corresponded with Charles Darwin (1809–1882) from May 1869 until December 1875.Pearn, Alison M. (2010) "This Excellent Observer...": The Correspondence between Charles Darwin and James Crichton-Browne 1869 - 1875, History of Psychiatry, 21, 160 - 175Browne, E. Janet (1985) Darwin and the Face of Madness (in) The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, Vol 1, People and Ideas, edited by Bynum, W.F., Porter, Roy and Shepherd, Michael, London: Tavistock, pp 151 - 165Gilman, Sander L. (1982) Seeing the Insane Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press and reprinted (1996) New York: Bison Books, especially pp. 179-191Appignanesi, Lisa (2008) Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present London: Virago Press, especially page 110Prodger, Phillip (2009) Darwin's Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution Oxford University Press, especially pp 92 - 101 The bulk of the correspondence occurred during the preparation of Crichton-Browne's famous West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports and also of Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.Darwin, Charles R. (1872) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals London: John MurrayDarwin, Charles, Ekman, Paul, and Prodger, Phillip (1998) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd edn, London: Harper Collins On 8th June 1869, Darwin sent Crichton-Browne his copy of Duchenne's Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, asking for his comments. Crichton-Browne seems to have mislaid the book for about a year at the Wakefield asylum; but, on 6th June 1870, he returned it (with some embarrassment) to Darwin, along with an illustration of a woman with occasionally erected hair from the Southern Counties Asylum at Dumfries. Darwin explored a huge range of subjects with Crichton-Browne, including references to Maudsley's Body and Mind,Maudsley, Henry (1870) Body and Mind: The Gulstonian Lectures for 1870 London: Macmillan and Co. the psychology of blushing, the functions of the platysma muscle (Darwin's "bête noire"), and the clinical phenomena of bereavement and grief. Darwin's mysterious symptoms which included vomiting, sweating, sighing, and weeping, particularly troublesome in the early months of 1872, seem to have largely resolved around the time that he completed his work on the origins of the human emotions. Building on the early psychiatric photography of Hugh Welch Diamond (1809 -1886)Gilman, Sander L. (1976) The Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography New York: Brunner Mazel at Brookwood Hospital (Surrey's second County Asylum), Crichton-Browne sent about forty photographs of patients to Charles Darwin during the composition of his The Expression of the Emotions;Smith, Jonathan (2006) Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture Cambridge University Press however, Darwin used only one of these in the book (Figure 19) and this (Darwin Correspondence Project Letter 7220) was of the patient (with occasional erection of her hair "like wire") (photographer unknown) - under the care of Dr James Gilchrist at the Southern Counties Asylum, the public wing of (Crichton Royal) at Dumfries. The complete correspondence between Crichton-Browne and Charles Darwin forms a remarkable contribution to the beginnings of behavioural science. Nevertheless, Crichton-Browne attached greater importance to his six volumes of West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports (1871–1876) (Jellinek, 2005)Jellinek, E.H. (2005) Sir James Crichton-Browne (1840 - 1938): pioneer neurologist and scientific drop-out, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 98, 9, 428 - 430 - sending Darwin a copy of Volume One on 18th August 1871 - and to the neurological journal Brain which developed from them, in which he was assisted by John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911),Critchley, Macdonald (1998) John Hughlings Jackson: Father of English Neurology Oxford University PressJackson, J. Hughlings (1884) Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System: The Croonian Lectures The Lancet, i', 535, 649, 739; reprinted (1931) in ''Selected Writings, vol. II, pp 45 - 75 London: Hodder and Stoughton David Ferrier (1843-1928) and John Charles Bucknill (1817-1897) . It is notable, however, that Charles Darwin did not make a contribution to the Asylum Reports, nor did he visit the asylum when invited by Crichton-Browne in 1873. In 1875, Crichton-Browne ridiculed the classification of mental disorders produced by the Edinburgh psychiatrist David SkaeFish, Frank (1965) David Skae MD FRCS, Founder of the Edinburgh School of Psychiatry Medical History, '''9 , 36 - 53 (1814–1873) which had been promoted by Skae's pupil Thomas CloustonBeveridge, Allan (1991) Thomas Clouston and the Edinburgh School of Psychiatry (in) 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 1841 - 1991, edited by Berrios, G.E. and Freeman, Hugh, London: Gaskell/The Royal College of Psychiatrists, pp 359 - 388 (1840–1915); Skae had sought to associate specific forms of mental disorder with diseased states of various bodily organs. Crichton-Browne characterised it as "philosophically unsound, scientifically inaccurate and practically useless".Crichton-Browne, James (1875) Skae's Classification of Mental Diseases, Journal of Mental Science, 21, 339 - 365 In 1879, Crichton-Browne published his own considerations of the neuropathology of insanityCrichton-Browne, James (1879) On The Weight of the Brain and its Component Parts in the Insane, Brain, 1''', 514 - 518, '''2, 42 - 67 making some exact predictions about the morbid anatomy of the human brain in cases of severe psychiatric disorder: he proposed that in the insane the weight of the brain was reduced, that the lateral ventricles were enlarged and that the burden of damage fell on the left cerebral hemisphere. This involved an evolutionary view of cerebral localisation with an emphasis on the asymmetry of cerebral functions which he derived from the clinical research of the French neurologist Paul Broca (1824–1880)Broca, Pierre Paul (1861) Remarques sur le Siège de la Faculté de Langage Articulé; suivis d'une observation d'aphémie (perte de la parole) Bulletin de la Societé de l'Anatomie de Paris, 36, pp 330 - 357McManus, Chris (2002) Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson on language centres in the brain - originally published in 1861 - and presented by Broca to the British Association for the Advancement of Science at its 1868 meeting in Norwich (chaired by Joseph Dalton Hooker). The question of asymmetrical cerebral functions had been raised many years earlier by the Edinburgh phrenologist Hewett Cottrell Watson in the Phrenological Journal.Watson, Hewett Cottrell (1836) What is the Use of the Double Brain ? The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 9', 608-611Holland, Sir Henry (1840) On the Brain as a Double Organ. In ''Chapters on Mental Physiology. London: Longman, Brown, Green & LongmansWigan, Arthur Ladbroke (1844) A New View of Insanity: The Duality of Mind proved by the structure, functions, and diseases of the brain, and by the phenomena of mental derangement. London, Longmans et al Harrington, Anne (1987) Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: a study in nineteenth century thought Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press Crichton-Browne summarised his own views on psychosis and cerebral asymmetry in his most important scientific paper: On The Weight of the Brain (1879);Crow, T.J. (1995) A Darwinian Approach to the Origins of Psychosis, British Journal of Psychiatry, '''167, 12 - 25and the best appraisal is by Compston, 2007.Compston, Alastair (2007) Brain, 130, (3), 599 - 601 Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy 1875 - 1922 In 1875, Crichton-Browne was appointed as Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy, a position which involved the regular examination of wealthy Chancery patients throughout England and Wales.Neve, Michael and Turner, Trevor (1995) What the Doctor Thought and Did: Sir James Crichton-Browne (1840-1938) Medical History, 39, 399-432 He held this post until his retirement in 1922 and he combined it with the development of an extensive London consulting practice, becoming a familiar figure on the metropolitan medical scene.Oppenheim, Janet (1991) Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients and Depression in Victorian England London and New York: Oxford University Press, especially Chapter 2. In 1878, he followed his father as President of the Medico-Psychological Association; in 1883, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; and he served as Treasurer and Vice-President of the Royal Institution from 1889 till 1926. Crichton-Browne also made friendships in the literary world with the idiosyncratic historian Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) whose marital reputation he defended against the allegations of James Anthony Froude;Crichton-Browne, James with Alexander Carlyle (1903) The Nemesis of Froude: A Rejoinder to J.A.Froude's "My Relations with Carlyle" London and New York: John Lane, The Bodley Head and, less controversially, with his contemporary, the novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) who consulted Crichton-Browne about the anatomical peculiarities of the female brain. Crichton-Browne informed Hardy that the brain/body ratio was much the same in women as in men; but it is not clear that he drew Hardy's attention to the greater symmetry of female nervous structure. Crichton-Browne was a notable stylist and orator and he often combined this with a kind of couthy vernacular evocative of the Dumfries of his childhood. He was proud to have served as President of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society from 1892 to 1896 and, on 24th January 1895, he gave a remarkable and light-hearted Presidential lectureJames (1895) Conversazione, - and the Presidential Address: "On Emotional Expression" Transactions and the Journal of Proceedings of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society, Series II, 11, 72 - 77, Dumfries: the Courier and Herald Offices - in Dumfries - On Emotional Expression - in which he discussed some reservations about Darwin's views and touched on the role of the motor cortex in expression, on the relations of gender to expressive asymmetry, and on the relationship of language to the physical expression of the emotions. A few months later, on 30th June 1895 in London, Crichton-Browne delivered his famous Cavendish Lecture on Dreamy Mental States,Crichton-Browne, James (1895) Dreamy Mental States (reprinted in) Stray Leaves from a Physician's Portfolio (1927) London: Hodder and Stoughton, pp 1 - 42 in which he explored the relationship of trauma in the uniquely vulnerable temporal lobes to déjà vu, hallucinatory and supernatural experiences; this caught the attention of William James (1842-1910) who referred - rather dismissively - to Crichton-Browne in his Gifford lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience (delivered in Edinburgh in 1901-1902). In the early years of the twentieth century, Crichton-Browne delivered a number of lectures on the asymmetry of the human brain, publishing his conclusions in 1907.Crichton-Browne, James (1907) Dexterity and the Bend Sinister, Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, '''18', 623-652 Elder Statesman of British Psychiatry 1922 - 1938 In the Summer of 1920, Crichton-Browne delivered the first Maudsley Lecture to the Royal Medico-Psychological Association,Crichton-Browne, James (1920) The First Maudsley Lecture, Journal of Mental Science, 66, 199 - 225 at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, giving an affecting tribute to Henry Maudsley whose enthusiasm and energy in the 1860s had been a source of inspiration and encouragement to him. He spoke with some feeling of Maudsley the man, and of the divergence of their pathways in the later development of British psychiatry, regretting Maudsley's social and professional withdrawal in the last thirty years of his life. Crichton-Browne, rather in awe of Maudsley's intellectual powers, seems to have chilled at the unforgiving character of Maudsley's emotional landscape. Four years later, on 29th February 1924, Crichton-Browne gave the Ramsay Henderson Bequest Lecture in Edinburgh and this lecture formed a kind of peroration to his public career.Crichton-Browne, James (1924) The Story of the Brain, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd His title was The Story of the Brain. In this, he gave a remarkable tribute to members of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society - to George Combe (1788–1858), the author of The Constitution of Man (1828), to Andrew Combe (1797–1847), author of Observations on Mental Derangement (1831) - and to Robert Chambers (1802–1871) who had sought to combine phrenology with evolutionary Lamarckism in his Vestiges of the Natural History of CreationRobert (1844) Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation London: John Churchill, published anonymously, and reprinted (1994) (edited by James A. Secord) Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago PressSecord, James A. (2000) Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" '' Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago PressCrawford, Robert (2011) ''The Beginning and the End of the World: St Andrews, Scandal and the Birth of Photography Edinburgh: Birlinn - written in St Andrews as Chambers recuperated from a complex psychiatric disorder, published in 1844, and inverting Hutton's aphorism "no vestige of a beginning". However, Crichton-Browne did not mention that his lecture was delivered a century (almost to the day) after his father had joined the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. With increasing age, with the death of his first wife, and perhaps with his personal losses in the first world war, Crichton-Browne's rhetoric took on a more authoritarian tone, and this compromised his reputation in the last two decades of his life. Crichton-Browne's Legacy In spite of the pervasive influence of his medical psychology, Crichton-Browne remains a strangely neglected figure in the history of British psychiatry. His reputation as a raffish medical expert, his latterly reactionary political views, and his elegant but convoluted Victorian prose did little to attract twentieth century interest or opinion. Crichton-Browne's unusual longevity, taken together with his father's unique psychiatric career, brought the world of the early Edinburgh phrenologists - George Combe, Hewett Cottrell Watson and Robert Chambers - into contact with developing neuroscience in the course of the twentieth century - and he did not ignore the intervening influences of Duchenne de Boulogne, Pierre Paul Broca and Charles Scott Sherrington. The phrenologists' concept of the brain was of a genetically determined, dynamic system vulnerable to environmental stress. Crichton-Browne's psychiatric thinking showed a remarkable blend of social and neurological concerns and his considerations of the cerebral basis of psychotic disorder were well ahead of their time. Beyond this, Crichton-Browne's medical psychology embodied the accommodation of evolutionary theory within the framework of clinical observation. Within the medical world, he held out the promise of a continuum of neurological and psychiatric illness and, in the narrower world of psychiatry, he demonstrated a public role for the specialist in mental disorders. Very early in his career - a week after the publication of On the Origin of Species - Crichton-Browne emphasised the importance of psychiatric disorders in childhoodCrichton Browne, James (1860) The Psychical Diseases of Early Life, Journal of Mental Science, 6', 284 - 320 and, much later, he was to emphasise the distinction between organic and functional illness in the elderly.Crichton-Browne, James (1874) Senile Dementia, ''British Medical Journal, '''i, 601-603, 640-643 He was considered an expert in many aspects of psychological medicine, public health and social reform. He supported a campaign for the open-air treatment of tuberculosis, housing and sanitary reform for the working-classes, and a practical approach to sexually transmitted diseases. He condemned the corporal punishment of children. He stressed the importance of the asymmetric lateralization of brain function in the development of language and deplored the fads relating to ambidexterity advocated by (among others) Robert Baden-Powell. He was critical of public education systems for their repetitive and fact-bound character, warning of mental exhaustion in otherwise happy and healthy children. He was openly - even offensively - sceptical concerning the claims of psychic investigators and spiritualists (see The Times articles of 1897/1899 concerning the Ballechin House controversy) and of dietary faddists and vegetarians. He argued that the benefits of Freudian psychotherapy had been assessed with insufficient rigour. He advocated (in 1892) the fluoridation of human dietary intakeRing, Malvine E. (2007) A Scottish Physician Ahead of His Times: The Story of Sir James Crichton-Browne, Dental History Magazine, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, '''1', 1, pp 9 - 11 and he worried about the consequences of mass transportation by motor vehicles. In the last years of his life, from retirement at his home "Crindau" (37 Nunholm Road) by the River Nith in the Nunholm district of Dumfries, Sir James published a notable study of Robert Burns' medical problems and physical decline,Crichton-Browne, James (1925) Burns from a New Point of View London:Hodder and Stoughtonbased on some articles he had contributed to the Glasgow Herald, and seven volumes of memoirs selected from his commonplace books, consisting of fragmentary essays ranging widely over medical, psychological, biographical and Scottish themes.Crichton-Browne, James (1926) Victorian Jottings London: Etchells and MacdonaldCrichton-Browne, James (1927) Stray Leaves from a Physician's Portfolio London: Hodder and StoughtonCrichton-Browne, James (1930) What the Doctor Thought London: Ernest BennCrichton-Browne, James (1931) The Doctor's Second Thoughts London: Ernest BennCrichton-Browne, James (1932) The Doctor's After Thoughts London: Ernest BennCrichton-Browne, James (1937) From The Doctor's Notebook London: DuckworthCrichton-Browne, James (1938) The Doctor Remembers London: Duckworth Crichton-Browne was twice married and cherished a lifelong affection for the traditions of the Anglican liturgy; he was a loyal member of the congregation at the Church of St John the Evangelist, Dumfries. Through family connections he became friendly with the painter Hannah Gluckstein ("Gluck") (1895–1978) who executed an arresting portrait of Sir James in 1928, now in the National Portrait Gallery. Crichton-Browne was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1883 (with posthumous support from Charles Darwin) and he was knighted in 1886. He was a vigorous opponent of teetotalism, stating that "no writer has done much without alcohol". When he died on 31 January 1938, at the age of 97, Crichton-Browne - like Robert Burns, Thomas Carlyle and James Clerk Maxwell - was acclaimed as one of the greatest sons of Dumfries and Galloway in South-West Scotland; one of the last men in Britain to sport Dundreary whiskers - and as one of the last Victorians. See also *council housing *female brain *Gustav Fritsch *Eduard Hitzig *teleology References External links * American Journal of Public Health Sir James Crichton-Browne: Victorian Psychiatrist and Public Health Reformer (biography) Category:1840 births Category:1938 deaths Category:British psychiatrists Category:History of mental health in the United Kingdom Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Category:History of psychiatry Category:British neuroscientists Category:History of neuroscience Category:Mental health activists